The guy at the end of the bar is loud. He doesn’t so much offer opinions as make pronouncements. He’s like Top 40 radio endlessly repeating a limited playlist that he just keeps going back to over and over and over. But all of the songs are terrible. “You know what I think?” he sometimes starts, and everyone else thinks, “Yes, yes we do. Because you’ve repeated all of these rants twice a night forever.”
That guy. Every affordable bar has one. Nobody’s happy about that, but these guys seem to come with the decor.
The stock corner-bar loudmouth is sometimes described as “opinionated,” but that’s not really true. He doesn’t have opinions. He just collects Things He Says Because He Heard Other People Say Them. He heard someone else say something and he thought that person sounded smart, so he thinks he’ll sound smart if he repeats it. “Here’s what I think,” he starts, but he’s never actually thought much about any of the stuff that follows that.
I have yet to encounter any of the seemingly omnipresent incarnations of That Guy whose repertoire of parroted “opinions” did not include a boilerplate rant about how the NFL these days has gotten “soft.” It’s the ultimate Golden Oldie, still charting and getting played in heavy rotation after generations. That Guy seems to consider this rant a sure thing — a go-to topic he can switch to whenever he feels like he’s losing the room. When he can’t get anybody to look in his direction during his usual rendition of “Why should I have to press 1 for English?” or “These Kids And Their Cell Phones” he’ll segue into “The Refs Are Ruining the Game and the NFL Is Getting Soft” and that’ll usually get somebody to shrug in agreement. Nobody likes refs.
This rant will also allow That Guy to fill the next 20 minutes of his void-avoiding life by repeating his story about this one hit he saw, this one time, on this guy, and it was awesome. That story, like many of his stories, ends with “You shoulda seen it.” (It seems to frustrate That Guy a little bit that others never quite get as excited about this story as he does. But, well, they shoulda seen it and they didn’t. That’s on them. He did see it, probably. Or something like it, anyway. And since it’s better to have seen it than not to have seen it, and since he saw it and they didn’t, that makes him better than them, right? Right. I mean, that’s just math.)
The good thing about this always loud rant about the NFL getting soft is that it allows you to take a 5- or 10-minute mental break. You don’t have to listen, because That Guy isn’t going to say anything you haven’t heard hundreds of times before. You don’t even have to pretend to listen, because this Golden Oldie is so familiar that That Guy is on autopilot. He’s not paying any attention either. So for the next several minutes your mind is all your own, free to go wherever it likes to go.
Like most people who sometimes visit affordable local bars, I’ve developed several coping tactics for dealing with That Guy. Try to sit as far away as possible. Avoid eye contact. Add a sympathy surcharge to the bartender’s tip for their superhuman ability to refrain from eye-rolling. Double that for the poor waitresses.
But it was only recently that I realized there’s another important rule regarding the standard-issue corner-bar loudmouth. When you come across That Guy, never, ever elect him president.
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